Producing Better Bindings: Completeness

Note: like the previous post, this one is a follow-up on a series written by someone else. We're all building on top of giant's shoulders. My giant today is Sébastien Pouliot from Xamarin. Read his series Producing Better Bindings.

Second Note: if you're reading this from a news aggregator, you might miss the embedded gists. Read the original there.

I'm lately enjoying writing bindings for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac, a lot for the fun, very little for profit. The biggest project by far was creating a managed bindings for cocos2d (v2). This library is huge (~2500 public methods), and the API is far from being fixed in stone. The library is so big that at some point I just gave up, until Miguel resumed the effort during end-of-year break.

Chipmunk bindings for MonoTouch

(c) S. Delcroix 2013

I'm quite pleased to announce the availability of Chipmunk bindings for monotouch. I started that last year, and bound just enough of it to get a sample working, added some constraints lately in order to place labels, and completed it since for the beauty of the task. The image next to this is a screenshot from a system using a motor, a gear joint, pivot joints and some more.

At this point in time, the ~2000 lines of manually crafted lines of code can be found in this pull request, but you probably won't have to wait long before it's merged in the monotouch-bindings repository.

C++ bindings for monotouch using SWIG

(c) S. Delcroix 2013

I love bindings. I've always loved them. Back in the days, I was binding gtk+ and other gobject libs to C# for fun and f-spot usage. Then I bound some obj-C libs to monotouch for a client and some for pleasure.

But last week I faced something new. I wanted to bind (for monotouch) a C++ iPhone lib for which I only received the binaries and the headers files. The component was too large to even think about doing a manual C glue code. I googled about the possible solutions and the only valuable advice was to use SWIG, without any rationale or tutorial. This is then probably a first. An explanation on why SWIG can help you for this, the problem I ran into and the solutions I found.